Wolfgang Tillmans MoMA’s “members field guide” compares the emotional impact of a wall of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans to a “perfect pop song,” which makes me feel not so out of it, as many a “perfect pop song” also leaves me cold. The just-deceased Peter Schjeldahl calls Tillmans a “genius” in his New Yorker review, […]
Winslow Homer painted people, but he was not a portraitist. He painted mountains and rivers, but he was not a landscape artist. He painted activities, but he was not a genre artist. In 19th-century American art, there was no one like him. He stands alone. He was a storyteller, but he rarely told you what […]
The post-van Gogh rehang of the permanent galleries at SBMA features a selection of largely 19th-century American painting (perhaps in fulfillment of the 1958 commitment to Preston Morton in consideration of her gift of 50 paintings). While maybe a third were seen in the 2012 exhibition, “Scenery, Story, Spirit,” most of the others are new […]
Two months away from Santa Barbara were never far from art, and although it is excruciatingly difficult to translate visual experiences into words, I can at least record my reactions as I recall them. First, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is my home base away from home, a five-minute walk from our apartment on 79th […]
Ever since the George Floyd tragedy, cultural and media institutions have been making up for a century of neglect by spotlighting Black-related art and artists. The relatively staid Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has ridden the wave, first with a new “Afrofuturist” period room, then a dossier exhibition around Why Born Enslaved!, a […]
The exhibition “Through Vincent’s Eyes” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art disabused me of two long-held ideas about Van Gogh’s art: 1. That his style was a reaction to Impressionism, and 2. That he never painted a bad picture. Before I get into my critique, however, I should commend curator Eik Kahng and the […]
Museum- and gallery-going were necessarily down in 2021, thanks to Covid, but we were fortunate to have our base in New York and family in San Francisco, giving us a chance to catch some of the season’s big shows and rub shoulders with smaller venues along the way. In retrospect, the year doesn’t look so […]
I wondered, as I wandered through the many galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, how long will we have this kind of encyclopedic, time-specific museum? Or more to the point, how long will we have them outside New York and a few other world capitals? You have to remember that the encyclopedic museum (EM) […]
The opening galleries at both the Whitney and Philadelphia were full of people and Jasper Johns’s greatest hits from the late ’50s: targets, flags, numbers and maps. By the end, the crowds had dissipated and one wondered if the same could be said for Johns’s art. I admit that I had struggled, during the latter […]
The Met’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” is more a show of social and political history than art. Surrealism was an expression of nonconformity, even to the point of rebellion, that artists around the world (defined here as Japan, Mexico, South America and Europe) latched onto, often but not always cognizant of the dicta laid down in […]
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